On Hartshorne’s Objections to Determinism and Compatibilism

The problem of determinism and human freedom, which is one of the great debates in philosophy, has been discussed many times by philosophers who have very distinctive perspectives and thereby different results related to the problem. Charles Hartshorne as an American process philosopher has significantly contributed to the debate with his own thoughts and considerations. His thoughts can be divided into two major parts. First is the claim that there is a relative indeterminism within the universe. Second is that (hard) determinist and compatibilist positions have serious theoretical and practical difficulties. This paper is only about second part of his thoughts related to the debate. So, in this paper, firstly, I attempt to depict and examine his objections to the arguments for determinism and compatibilism. And then, secondly, I try to interrogate two fundamental assumptions behind his objections. One is the fallacy of burden of proof and other is a fallacy based on the appeal to common sense in order to prove any factual or metaphysical assertion

On Flew’s Compatibilism and His Objections to Theistic Libertarianism

Flew strongly defends a compatibilist thesis in the free will debate before going on to totally object to theistic libertarianism. His objections basically rely on his compatibilism embracing the notion of agent causation, which is not very common in compatibilist theses. Since he is a strong proponent of ordinary language philosophy, he also holds that linguistic analyses can certainly solve the free will problem as well as many other problems of philosophy. In doing so, he first uses the paradigm cases based on our common sense experience and then assumes the verity of principle of alternative possibilities. This study attempts to show, on the one hand, that there are some serious difficulties in both his justification of compatibilism and his objections to theistic libertarianism, and on the other hand, that he cannot easily defend both at the same time

Good Features to Correlate for Visual Tracking

During the recent years, correlation filters have shown dominant and spectacular results for visual object tracking. The types of the features that are employed in these family of trackers significantly affect the performance of visual tracking. The ultimate goal is to utilize robust features invariant to any kind of appearance change of the object, while predicting the object location as properly as in the case of no appearance change. As the deep learning based methods have emerged, the study of learning features for specific tasks has accelerated. For instance, discriminative visual tracking methods based on deep architectures have been studied with promising performance. Nevertheless, correlation filter based (CFB) trackers confine themselves to use the pre-trained networks which are trained for object classification problem. To this end, in this manuscript the problem of learning deep fully convolutional features for the CFB visual tracking is formulated. In order to learn the proposed model, a novel and efficient backpropagation algorithm is presented based on the loss function of the network. The proposed learning framework enables the network model to be flexible for a custom design. Moreover, it alleviates the dependency on the network trained for classification. Extensive performance analysis shows the efficacy of the proposed custom design in the CFB tracking framework. By fine-tuning the convolutional parts of a state-of-the-art network and integrating this model to a CFB tracker, which is the top performing one of VOT2016, 18% increase is achieved in terms of expected average overlap, and tracking failures are decreased by 25%, while maintaining the superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 tracking datasets.Comment: Accepted version of IEEE Transactions on Image Processin

The role of social and human capital in assessing firm value: A longitudinal study of UK firms

This study examines the role of board social and human capital in assessing the market value of firms in the UK context. As the world economy has shifted from manufacturing to service and knowledge-based economies, attributes such as knowledge, expertise, skills, ability and reputation are increasingly fundamental to the success of business enterprises. There is a growing consensus that these attributes are an increasingly valuable form of capital, asset or resource, despite their intangibility. In accounting, there are a number of problems arising from the accountability of non-physical, non-financial capital. Firstly, some forms of capital and certain assets are neither recognised nor presented in the statement of financial position. Secondly, some accounting practices relating to intangible assets are very conservative, resulting in undervalued assets and overstated liabilities. Consequently, there is an increasing gap between the book value and market value of firms. This gap restricts the relevance of information presented in financial statements and suggests that there is something missing in financial statements. This is the research problem being addressed in this study. While prior literature demonstrates that it has proven difficult to operationalise intangible forms of capital, there has been significant empirical attention and theoretical development in social and human forms. This thesis aims to contribute to accounting theory and practice by exploring the impact that board social and human capital have on firm market value. In light of extant research, it is hypothesised that social and human capital possessed at board level are positively related to the market value of firms. This study employs the Ohlson’s (1995) residual income valuation model to test the impact of social and human capital using a sample of UK firms listed on the FTSE All Share index for a period of 10 years (2001-2010). Social and human capital measures are derived from interlocking directorate ties and detailed biographic information of board directors. This study benefits from Pajek and Ucinet network packages to generate network maps and calculate positional metrics such as centrality and structural hole measures.University of Exeter Business Schoo

Advanced Non-Overlapping Winding Induction Machines for Electrical Vehicle Applications

This thesis presents an investigation into advanced squirrel-cage induction machines (IMs), with a particular reference to the reduction of the total axial length without sacrificing the torque and efficiency characteristics and analysis of recently found non-sinusoidal bar current phenomenon, which occurs under some certain design and operating conditions, and affects the overall performance characteristics of the IMs. As a first step, the most convenient method is determined by utilizing a fractional-slot concentrated winding (FSCW) technique, which has advantages such as non-overlapping windings, high slot filling factor, and simple structure. After implementing this technique, it is found that due to the highly distorted magnetomotive forces (MMFs) created by the FSCWs, significant high rotor bar copper loss occurs. In order to reduce the MMF harmonics without increasing the size of the machine, a new technique titled “adapted non-overlapping winding” is developed. This technique consists of the combination of the auxiliary tooth and phase shifting techniques, resulting in a stator with concentrated windings of two-slot coil pitches but without overlapping the end-windings. Thanks to this method a large number of the MMF harmonics are cancelled. Thus, a low copper loss IM with significantly reduced total axial length is obtained. Influence of design parameters; such as stator slot, rotor slot, and pole numbers, number of turns, stack length, stator and rotor geometric parameters, etc. on the performance characteristics of the advanced IM is investigated and a comprehensive comparison of advanced and conventional IMs is presented. This thesis also covers an in-depth investigation on the non-sinusoidal bar current phenomenon. It is observed that the rotor bar current waveform, usually presumed to be sinusoidal, becomes non-sinusoidal in some operation and design conditions, such as high speed operation close to synchronous speed, or fairly high electrical loading operation, or in the IMs whose air-gap length is considerably small, etc. Influences of design and operating parameters and magnetic saturation on the rotor bar current waveform and the performance characteristics of squirrel-cage IMs are investigated. The levels of iron saturation, depending on the design and operating parameters, in different machine parts are examined and their influences are also investigated, whilst the dominant part causing the non-sinusoidal rotor bar current waveform is identified. It is revealed that the magnetic saturation, particularly in the rotor tooth, has a significant effect on the bar current waveform

RE-THINKING ENTREPRENEURSHIP, INTRAPRENEURSHIP, AND INNOVATION: A MULTI-CONCEPT PERSPECTIVE

This paper aims to show an understanding of the vague issues on the relations among the concepts of entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship and innovation. Some of the greatest intellectual challenges of our time are emerging from the huge study of business management and organization. Through these issues; creating and applying smart ideas that form the practice of business and management, namely entrepreneurial activities, have been noticeably stepping forward for more than three decades. An updated entrepreneurial view in business and management is crucial for reaching the aim of innovation; besides, as it’s mentioned above, this perspective deserves to be scrutinized deeply in order to obtain a full understanding of the key concepts of entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and innovation also to provide a lean conclusion, which is mainly based on the dual and multi-relations of the related terms. The approach taken in the literature, generally construes entrepreneurship as the main concept regarding entrepreneurial thought; intrapreneurship as its sub-concept; and considers innovation as redundant to include in some of the entrepreneurial definitions; though it’s not totally been ignored. However, the new economical framework has proven that a fresh insight is required from now on, in order to explain how to survive in this rapidly changing environment.  From this perspective, the main questions of this paper are:Can the concepts of entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship and innovation be appraised in an integrative approach, contemporarily? In other words, can these concepts be united under the umbrella of a valid single term different from these?If yes, how should the new concept be discussed and what are the attributes of the new character emerging from this concept

Control Analysis for Grid Tied Battery Energy Storage System for SOC and SOH Management

Frequency regulation is an important part of grid ancillary services in the UK power system to mitigate the impacts of variable energy resources and uncertainty of load on system frequency. The National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET), the primary electricity transmission network operator in the UK, is introduced various frequency response services such as firm frequency response (FFR) and the new fast enhanced frequency response (EFR), which are designed to provide real-time response to deviations in the grid frequency. Flexible and fast response capabilities of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) make them an ideal choice to provide grid frequency regulation. This thesis presents control algorithms for a BESS to deliver a charge/discharge power output in response to deviations in the grid frequency with respect to the requisite service specifications, while managing the state-of-charge (SOC) of the BESS to optimize the availability of the system. Furthermore, this thesis investigates using the BESS in order to maximize triad avoidance benefit revenues while layering UK grid frequency response services. Using historical UK electricity prices, a balancing service scheduling approach is introduced to maximize energy arbitrage revenue by layering different types of grid balancing services, including EFR and FFR, throughout the day. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm delivers both dynamic and non-dynamic FFR and also EFR to NGET required service specifications while generating arbitrage revenue as well as service availability payments in the balancing market. In this thesis, a new fast cycle counting method (CCM) considering the effect of current rate (C-rate), SOC and depth-of-discharge (DOD) on battery lifetime for grid-tied BESS is presented. The methodology provides an approximation for the number of battery charge-discharge cycles based on historical microcyling SOC data typical of BESS frequency regulation operation. The EFR and FFR algorithms are used for analysis. The obtained historical SOC data from the analysis are then considered as an input for evaluating the proposed CCM. Utilizing the Miner Rule’s degradation analysis method, lifetime analysis based on battery cycling is also provided for a lithium-titanate (LTO) and lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt-oxide (NMC) battery. The work in this thesis is supported by experimental results from the 2MW/1MWh Willenhall Energy Storage System (WESS) to validate the models and assess the accuracy of the simulation results